A while ago I posted some fixed ffmpeg and x264 packages for Ubuntu Jaunty (.deb) but you may want to upgrade to the latest version of ffmpeg and x264 (whichever the latest version is). So this how-to will explain how to install the latest FFmpeg and x264 and then how to always update those packages.

Nautilus (the GNOME file manager) is able to display thumbnails for several file types: images, video, audio (holding you mouse over a sound file for a few second), text, pdf, etc.

Pidgin 2.6.0 was made available a few days ago, on August 19, 2009, and today Pidgin 2.6.1 was released as a bug fix version to the new stable 2.6 series. Among the features and improvements which come with 2.6.0 are:

I recently bumped into a cool RTS (real time strategy) game for Linux called Hive Rise. Although the game is not open-source, it offers a free Linux download as a RUN file which can easily be installed on your Ubuntu box. To install it in Ubuntu, you only need to follow these steps:

Wine 1.1.28 was released on August 21 and it comes with new features and improvements like support for IRDA protocol, faster wineprefix creation, more image formats in WindowsCodecs and various other bug fixes.

ImageMagick is a powerful set of tools used to perform various operations on images directly from the command-line. To install it in Debian type as root:

The release of GIMP 2.7.0 is a first step towards GIMP 2.8, the next stable release. Please note that this is an unstable development snapshot and read the GIMP 2.7 release notes. Actually, in the following repository, the current version of Gimp is 2.7.1 already. To install it in Ubuntu, just copy & paste the following commands into a terminal to add the Launchpad PPA repository:

We posted instructions for upgrading ALSA on Ubuntu to version 1.0.20 but there are a lot of steps to follow so for this reason I searched for an alternative and found a script on the ubuntuforums.org (thanks to soundcheck)

With ATI Catalyst 9.8, ATI finally has support for newer kernels. The Linux 2.6.29 kernel was released in March, but it has taken until today for AMD to release any support for this kernel. However, at the same time, they have also released support for the Linux 2.6.30 kernel, which arrived back in June.

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (known by the acronym ALSA) is a Linux kernel component intended to replace the original Open Sound System (OSS) for providing device drivers for sound cards.

ffmpeg is a multiplatform, open-source library for video and audio files. It is usualy available in your distribution repositories, so search for it and install it.

This article will present 19 ffmpeg very useful commands.

This is the third article in the Bash tips series, you can find the other two here and here.

Let’s face it, no matter which operating system you are using, you got to surf the web. It seems like a good idea if your browser automatically knew what you had bookmarked on the other operating system and you don’t have to customize your settings, passwords, search pages and even addons all over again. Well if you use Firefox, and want to achieve something like this, then read on.

0 A.D (Zero Anno Domini) is a real-time strategy game developed by Wildfire Games which has recently released the source code, thus allowing us to enjoy the game without having to pay anything. The game has excellent graphics which are unfortunately quite rare in the Linux world.

Following the article on configuring Urban Terror, a popular first-person shooter game based on the ioQuake3 engine, here is a guide for configuring the original ioQuake3 game, including customisation of cvars, using new maps, weapons and characters models, and more.

Urban Terror (or UrT for short, not to be confused with Unreal Tournament) is a great standalone first-person shooter available for Linux too, using the ioQuake3 engine.

KDE 4.3 was released just yesterday, and it comes with a lot of great new features and improvements, like the the new Plasma theme called Air, new Plasma widgets, several improvements to Dolphin, the default KDE4 file manager, improvements to the KDE games, and these are just a tiny part of all the improvements KDE4 introduced.

If you no longer uses POP3 email and a seperate client and prefers to use web-based email clients such as GMail, then I have the simple solution for you to enable having GMail as the default system-wide email client in Ubuntu (in conjunction with Firefox or